


Next Line, Next Box

by ideny



Category: Papers Please (Video Game), 逆転裁判 | Gyakuten Saiban | Ace Attorney
Genre: Gen, Phoenix Wright Kink Meme, the other von Karmas
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-22
Updated: 2014-12-22
Packaged: 2018-03-02 21:34:06
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,358
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2826863
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ideny/pseuds/ideny
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Miles is the inspector. Someone else we know is Jorji. Nothing is very happy.</p>
<p>For a kink meme request for a crossover.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Next Line, Next Box

**Author's Note:**

> Papers, Please takes place in an expy Eastern Bloc hell, a little bit jokey, mostly not. Given AA, Arstotzka ended up more German than anything else. Please feel free to take my head off if I've handled the setting badly.

As he waits in the cold air he practices answers for what, if this goes well, no one will ask.

\---

_Congratulations_ , the letter had begun.

Before the letter and the lottery there had been an interview, they preferred the word interview:

\- Miles? Not Milos? That name doesn't sound Arstotzkan, ha? We can't have an inspector, ha ha, who can't spell his own name. Clearly the Ministry of Education has more work to do for you mountain goats.

No, sirs. Yes, sirs. Miles. 

\- You have a family?

My sisters. One is older, one is younger.

My niece, the older one's daughter.

She was married, sirs. Her husband was killed in Paradizna during the liberation. 

Very proud, sirs. Yes.

And our father.

\---

The apartment was sized for perhaps two people, and Ilse had said they were lucky to be only five.

Awake in the cold, the last night before the first day, he prayed (superstition - say instead that he hoped and hoped someone heard him) that no one would try to cross the border who should not be there. That none of the papers would be counterfeit.

Except by three days in he found himself hoping that all of them would be frauds and obvious ones. Stupid frauds, with last year's documents or someone else's picture or named Mickey Napoleon Bonaparte Mouse.

The checkpoint was closed early one overcast afternoon, and the gossip that crept under the metal shutter was about a bomber at another checkpoint, and that the inspector had failed to notice a five-kilo difference between the passport and the scale.

Ha.

\---

_Because I was led to believe_ \- no.

\---

The man had appeared for the first time the day after the first bombing with no papers at all, hummed the national anthem (the fourth in three years) as if he couldn't get it out of his head. And he had waved his fingers like a little child when he was given a slip of paper with a red stamp and told to go.

He had come back the next day with a passport made out of the cardboard from the lining of a suitcase. The Obristan seal, Miles had told him, surprised to hear his own voice, is in fact a bird.

Not a daisy.

\---

_Because of my sisters._

\---

One Thursday he had found Ilse weeping and furious in the dark hallway of the apartment block, hands twisted, face twisted. The Ministry of Health had sent a letter, made an in-person visit, told her she had been a widow long enough. ( _And Franzi, they talked to Franzi, too, the animals, pigfuckers -_ )

Posters of red-cheeked children looking at the horizon had recently appeared on the walls around the tram station. The same poster, many times in a row.

The old man had already begun to tell Ilse much the same thing.

\---

_Because of the boys my sisters did not marry._

\---

The guards and the other inspectors had called him Uncle and Old Man. Your hair is grey, they had said. Otherwise, Uncle, you're very well preserved.

But after three months his superiors had seemed to forget that his nickname was a joke and had presented him with two new inspectors that he was to - guide. Be responsible for. 

Konrad had been tall and blond and had smiled instinctively if he thought you were looking. Simon had been taller and dark and if you smiled at him, he would go from not smiling to smiling even less. They had reminded him of herding dogs as puppies, all long thin legs and eyes that care too much about what you think of them. And wanting to be useful.

He had pointed them at the newspaper kiosk where the woman was friendliest and brewed camellia tea on the coldest mornings. Pointed out the stand that sold currywurst in the fiction that they might have the money to spare. 

Had told them about the five-kilo differences.

Had told himself not to get involved.

\- Again. He is **joking** , Konrad had said in passing one morning. 

Who is?

\- This man with the hair like a hedgehog and a passport with the ink still wet.

\- He **had** a passport?, asked Simon.

He had brought home stories of Simon and Konrad and Herr Hedgehog in the evenings because they were the best stories he had. Ilse would cook and Frieda would hang onto her skirt and Franzi would study in the grey light from the window of the room that had a window, and the old man would sit and wait and pound his cane on the floor.

(Konrad would talk generically about girls with a fretful energy, would sink in his chair whenever someone said _prettier than all of them_ , would submerge further into silence when the conversations became more than general, blink his too-wide blue eyes.

For Simon it had been one girl in particular that he mentioned, not often and with such deliberation that he might as well have been unwinding barbed wire with his bare hands. Red hair.

Simon had a sister, too, he had been looking out for. 

Konrad admitted with too many words that it had been his brother who had been looking out for him.)

He had brought them to the park by the apartment block on the Day of Independence and Unity (the fourth new national holiday in three years), introduced them to his sisters and to Frieda and the old man where anyone could see. In their grey coats they had bowed like toy soldiers on an ornamental clock, and spent the afternoon teaching Frieda songs and how to identify birds. As far as Frieda had been concerned, the introduction had been entirely satisfactory.

His sisters received no return visit in the following weeks, so it had seemed possible that the Ministry of Health had concurred with Frieda.

However, Simon had had barely a minute, one cloudy morning, to explain that he was being transferred away. To another city. But - thank you. For what you have done. Thank you. Good-bye.

Two weeks later, Konrad more simply disappeared.

\---

_Because of the guns._

\---

He could not handle a rifle, that was what the guards were for.

Had he not done his military service?

He had. No, he had, and that was -

But had been another five-kilo discrepancy, or three, and the inspectors' booths were outfitted with rifles.

\---

_Because someone -_

\---

The rifles had not put an end to the discrepancies and the next one had come while Herr Hedgehog had been standing in front of him with the best passport yet and they had been locked in the booth together with the sounds of running feet outside and the man had looked more serious than ever before.

\- We have better weather, up north.

Is that so?

\- It's so.

The thin walls of the shed had vibrated and the official documents on them had fluttered, the citations and petty commendations both.

\- Do you know what you need to go to Obristan?

Is that a joke?

\- A joke?

Two pigs, a pair of silk stockings, and a tablet of anaesthetic. A joke.

\- Obristan passports, one each. If you're interested.

\---

_Because what was saving the money **for** , there is never enough, you might as well spend it on **something!**_

\---

\- Herr Inspektor...Herr Inspektor. I am sorry. You said five but they say they had only the materials for four. 

\- Herr Inspektor, I would not say this but the border is closing.

Four.

Ilse, Franzi, Frieda, and the old man.

That is what he ought to be thinking.

\---

_Because there may have been no other time._

\---

Frieda has her face buried in her mother's coat, and her mother's face is remote like the first photographs of the Arctic. Franzi is between the older people, and he has had to tell her, fidget, it makes people like me suspicious if you don't.

A whistle blows into the grey morning, with snow starting to fall, and somewhere to the south, perhaps, the old man is waking up from the measure of slivovitz in last night's meal, and banging his cane on the floor.

The metal shutter flies up, and they are the first in line.

\- Papers, please.


End file.
